In this presentation it is shown how an UAV system can be built at low costs. The components of the system, the equipment as well as the control software are presented. The main focus of this presentation is on the generation of 3D point clouds from digital imagery. For this web services and free software solutions are presented which automatically generate 3D point clouds from arbitrary image configurations. Possibilities of georeferencing are described whereas the achieved accuracy has been determined. The presented workflow is finally used for the acquisition of 3D geodata. On the example of a landfill survey it is shown that marketable products can be derived using a low-cost UAV. At the end of the presentation the latest trends in the UAV market are presented.

Frank Neitzel is a Professor for Geo-IT and Geodesy at the Technical University (TU) Berlin. He has a lot of experience in building affordable drones for 3D Geo-data collection and already published related papers.